General Election 2015: Letters to Thurrock's Parliamentary candidates – Humane and Sustainable Farming

Here’s the third of the letters I have sent out to my local Parliamentary candidates.  As usual, all letters and responses are included totally unedited.

The Letter

Dear Ms Billington,

I am writing to you as one of my constituency’s candidates in the forthcoming general election to ask that you promote a humane and sustainable farming system in the new parliament.

We need to introduce high standards of farm animal welfare. It is time to phase out production that uses cages and crates as they thwart the basic instincts of many animals to roam, forage and explore.

Animals should be kept in outdoor systems or, if they are housed, they should be kept in large barns with ample space, plenty of straw, natural light and effective ventilation. Genetic selection for fast growth or high yields should be avoided if this results in compromised welfare and systems should not be used if they require mutilations.

We need to encourage the adoption of balanced diets with a lower proportion of meat. This would deliver health benefits by reducing the incidence of heart disease, obesity and certain cancers; it would also lower greenhouse gas emissions. Although more crops would be needed for direct human consumption, this would be outweighed by a reduction in demand for feed crops.

Farming provides valuable income to many rural communities. There should be a particular focus on higher welfare production that delivers a better quality of food and a higher income to those farmers at the farmgate, benefitting both the farmer and the wider community through added value.

Much livestock production in the UK is industrial in nature. 60% of EU cereal is used as animal feed. For every 100 calories that we feed to animals in the form of human edible crops, we receive on average just 17-30 calories in the form of meat and milk. We need to avoid excessive use of cereals and put more emphasis on restoring the link between animals and the land.

We need to promote diets that include less but higher welfare meat in order to deliver a farming system that is less intensive, with less reliance on fertilisers and pesticides. This would mean reduced degradation of water, soil and air and lower use of water, land and energy as well as biodiversity gains. It would also enable animals to be kept to higher welfare standards.

Across Europe, around 700 million farm animals (hens, sows, rabbits, ducks and quail) spend some or all of their life confined in cramped, often barren cages.  Cages should be consigned to the history books and food production should be developed using extensive, outdoor and cage free systems.

Sustainable farming that nourishes our health, the environment and promotes higher animal welfare must become the rule, not the exception.

For further information on these issues, Compassion in World Farming has produced a Charter which sets out a proposed future direction of travel. It can be found here http://www.ciwf.org.uk/charter and is supported by further details in briefing notes, which can be found here: http://www.ciwf.org.uk/charter-briefing-notes

I hope you will feel able to support these policy suggestions and work towards realising them – in the UK and by taking a lead in Europe.

Yours sincerely,

Myles Cook

Only one reply so far…

The response

Dear Myles,

Thank you for getting in touch with me about an issue that is important to you. Sorry for the delay in getting back to you - I get hundreds of emails a week and it sometimes takes me a while to give each one a considered response.

The Labour Party believes that there are huge challenges facing the food and farming industry. It is clear that we need to produce more food without damaging the natural resources that we all depend on whilst promoting the highest possible animal welfare standards.

British food and farming is our largest manufacturing sector, employing over 3.5 million people. That is why the Labour Party is committed to delivering a long-term vision for a sustainable and secure food system. The next Labour Government will ensure that Britain becomes a world leader in food policy and production to ensure that everybody has the chance to eat safe, healthy, affordable and sustainable food, now and in the future.

To achieve this we will reinstate the Food 2030 strategy to coordinate food policy, so that everyone across the food system has a clear role to play. We will champion consumer choice, to better inform consumers about the food they eat, empowering them make informed choices.

We will work with food producers, farmers and fishermen to help meet the global food demand and participate in international food markets but at the same time protecting and enhancing our natural resources.

The Labour Party believes there should be no arbitrary trade-off between food production and wider issues of sustainability, or between food affordability and the natural environment. Those who argue that you can either have affordable and plentiful food, or you can protect the soil, the water and biodiversity, are simply wrong to set out such a binary choice.

That’s why the Labour Party believes we must continue to reform the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and work towards the delivery of multiple objectives.  To do this the Labour Party will make better use of CAP money going towards protecting the natural environment whilst at the same time supporting farmers. This is clear commitment from the Labour Party to make sure that the Common Agricultural Policy does far more to protect nature, support a vibrant rural economy and gets the best value for money.

We will also continue to maintain the highest possible standards of animal welfare because our Labour values tell us that we have a moral duty to treat the animals we share our planet with in a humane and compassionate way. No other major political party has such a proven track record of decisive action for animals at home, on farms and in the wild.

Thank you once again for writing to me and for sharing your important views about sustainable food and farming. If there's anything else you'd like to speak to me about, please do let me know.

Best wishes,

Polly

I will post any other replies I get or any follow-up questions I pose right here!

General Election 2015: Letters to Thurrock's Parliamentary candidates – Education cuts

Here’s the second of the letters I have sent out to my local Parliamentary candidates.  As usual, all letters and responses are included totally unedited.

The Letter

Dear candidate,

On Thursday 26 February, the Skills Funding Agency notified colleges that their budgets would be cut by around 17% in 2015/16. Due to protections on apprenticeship funding, this will translate to a funding cut of 24% for non-apprenticeship learning.

The further education sector is united in its opposition to these cuts, which will decimate further education in England. Millions of people use colleges every year as a springboard to improving their education and skills, and cuts of this size will shut the door on those who need it most.

The adult skills budget has been cut by 35% since 2009 and cannot sustain further cuts. Over 1 million learners have already been lost, and it is estimated that these latest cuts would lead to a further 400,000 people losing out on learning opportunities.

As a member of this constituency, I am writing to ask for your support in opposing these cuts. Please sign our petition http://fefunding.org.uk/sign-the-petition/ and add your voice to our call for a rethink on this drastic funding cut.

You can find a briefing with more details about the cuts here: http://fefunding.org.uk/background/

I hope you will pledge to oppose these deeply damaging cuts and call for proper investment in further education, which is the key to learning and employment for so many.

Thank you for your time and I look forward to hearing from you.

Myles Cook

I have only received one reply so far and here it is:

The Response

Dear Myles,

Sorry for all the separate responses to your emails! As you can see I am having a catch up day with lots of the questions that I get asked.

In regards to adult skills budget, I'm a strong believer in both lifelong learning and apprenticeships.I don't believe that improving provision for the latter should come at the cost of former. Adult education is vital for people to get the skills they need, to retrain for new work or to simply broaden their horizons. My mum spent most of her working life in adult education and I have inherited her passion and commitment to it.

The government have systematically hollowed out the funding for adult education over the last parliament which is a real loss. Labour's ambition is to put our FE colleges at the centre of a system of adult education - which fits well with both the local provision of the new South Essex College site in Grays and my ambitions to bring a Technical University to Thurrock. The party nationally has raised the prospect of funding post-19 education on a per learner basis.

Liam Byrne, who's our spokesperson on FE and skills gave a really interesting speech on Labour's thinking in this area last year, which you can read here http://www.labourbisteam.org.uk/liam-byrne-speech-ending-the-gap-between-classroom-and-career  and reflects our ambition to promote vocational learning in government.

We all know that there are going to be difficult decisions that need to be made, whoever is in government. I can’t promise a reversal of all of these cuts, and I don’t want to promise things I can’t deliver. But I hope that we can achieve the changes we need to strengthen adult and lifelong learning. Far too many people need it for it to be a poor relation in our education system.

If you'd ever like me to give you a call please let me know as you are so engaged in a number of different issues!

Best wishes,

Polly

I will post any other replies I get or any follow-up questions I pose right here!

General Election 2015: Letters to Thurrock's Parliamentary candidates - NHS

As regular readers will already know, I like sending letters to my MP knowing that I will either get a stock response or none at all; however, this year is particularly important as it is gearing up to be the hardest General Election result to predict in living memory.  That being the case, I have been part of a number of letter writing campaigns that have sent e-mails to all the prospective Parliamentary candidates in my constituency and this is the first of a number of postings that include both the original letter I sent (bearing in mind that I sent the generic letter that the website provided) and the replies I received.

The Letter

Dear Tim Aker, Jamie Barnes, Jackie Doyle-Price, Aba Kristilolu, and Polly Billington,

Last week, the head of the British Medical Association warned that after the election patients could be charged for basic NHS services.

Will you commit to keeping the NHS free at the point of use?

Yours sincerely,

Myles Cook

The Replies

Dear Mr Cook,

I completely oppose charges in the NHS. UKIP have committed to investing a further £3bn per year into the NHS, taken from our EU Contributions. We will also abolish hospital car parking charges.

Best wishes,

Tim Aker

Yes I do commit to keeping the NHS free at the point of use!

With my best regards,

Aba Kristilolu

As regular readers will also know, I never let anyone get away with just a single question when I can add a follow-up so here are my follow-up letters.

The Follow-ups

Dear Mr Aker,

Thank you for your reply.  It is nice that you oppose charges in the NHS, however, (and I have to say now that I am undecided on the UK's membership of the EU) you say that the extra investment will come from our EU contributions which is fine but that is predicated on the UK leaving the EU.  Has UKIP made an investigation into how much our leaving the EU might financially affect us in purely business terms?  Or, to put it another way, how much business may the UK expect to lose if we rescind our EU membership and would that be greater than the amount of money we pay to remain?

Regards,

Myles Cook

Dear Mr Kristilolu,

Thank you for making that commitment but have you given any thought to how the NHS can remain funded at the levels needed for it to function in an age of austerity?  Where would you make savings or changes to keep from robbing one fund to prop up another?

Regards,

Myles Cook

Only one candidate has replied to the follow-up question I posed and here is his response.

The Follow-up Response

Dear Myles Cook,

Austerity is an ideologically driven political decision. It has little to do with sustainable socio-economic governance. If you value the human, you will order the priority to support humanity.

Best wishes,

Aba

Did you really think I’d leave it there?  Here’s my further follow-up:

The Further Follow-up Question

Dear Mr Kristilolu,

While I totally agree with your reply we also have to live in the real world in which government spending outstrips its income from taxation, etc and the current administration has borrowed heavily despite its ideological attacks on the poor and vulnerable so there has to be some kind of balancing act to make sure that everything can be paid for that needs to be paid for without borrowing more so where would you begin to solve this problem?

Regards,

Myles

As usual, I will post all noteworthy responses right here!